1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a specification verification method for an application that is implemented by a computer. More specifically, the present invention relates to a specification verification technique that is suitable for document centric architecture.
2. Description of Related Art
Document centric architecture has been proposed and is being adopted in recent years in the field of computer applications.
According to a document centric architecture, most work is started by writing a document. The required documents for such work are then collected and end with the drafting of a different document. During such work, the documents involved in the work include essential information for executing the work. Thus, according to document centric architecture, a system is constructed based on documents and specifications, while taking a single unit of work to be a single drafting of one or multiple documents.
According to document centric architecture, states are associated with the metadata of the documents. If metadata A and B exist, the state of the metadata of a certain document, for example, can be described as “A is 15, and B is 0.”
The specifications of this document centric architecture include the below described types of operations, information on the initial documents, and completion condition.                Initial documents: A is greater than or equal to 0 and less than or equal to 20, and B is 0.        Operation X: Processing is performed for documents where A is less than 30, and as a result, A is set to 40 and B is set to A.        Operation Y: Processing is performed for documents where A is greater than 10 and less than 50, and as a result, A is set to 100.        Operation Z: Processing is performed for documents where A is greater than or equal to 40 and B is less than 10, and as a result, B is set to 100.        Completion condition: For documents where both A and B have become 100, processing is completed.        
In this case, according to an ideally created specification, processing will inevitably lead to the completion condition, if the above processing operations are applied to an initial document that has an appropriate metadata condition. However, when using real specifications after the application of processing operations, it is possible to generate documents that end up being abandoned before reaching the completion condition.
Further, when the number of operations and the type of documents are prepared in the document centric architecture, it has been impossible, within a practical processing time, to check all values on whether or not all documents will be correctly processed.
Japanese Unexamined Laid-open Patent Application No. 08-221399 discloses: referencing corresponding relationships between information (pseudo tags) indicating document logical structure defined beforehand by the user and multiple document logic structure definitions (document form definitions); finding of the degree of matching (search frequency) between the various document form definitions and source text drafted by the user using pseudo tags; displaying the document form definitions in order of degree-of-matching; and asking the user to select document form definitions. Then, according to the document form definitions selected by the user, the pseudo tags within the source text are converted to: information (SGML tag information) expressing document logic structure based on the document form definitions; and text including the conversion result is analyzed by a parser (SGML parser) for performing syntax analysis based on the document form definitions. Thereafter, consistency of the conversion result is verified.
Japanese Unexamined Laid-open Patent Application No. 2007-58750 discloses drafting of a data specification document that describes, in a language readily understood and described by a human, specifications of each data element included in an XML document, which describes application data and conditions to be fulfilled by each data element in relation to other data elements and the verification procedures for such conditions. A verification data generation device, based on a data specification description document, generates verification procedure data (XSLT script) for verification by computer of whether or not each of the data elements including in the target XML document satisfies the conditions described in this data specification description document.
Japanese Unexamined Laid-open Patent Application No. 2009-42865 discloses a system in which a reception unit of a data processing device receives a process identifier that specifies a process as a target relating to internal control, a search unit document component relating to the process identifier is received by the aforementioned reception unit, a verification unit verifies a relationship between the aforementioned document component searched by the search unit and another document component or document, and a results output unit outputs the results of the aforementioned verification by the verification unit.
However, none provides a plan for document centric architecture to solve the problems of comprehensiveness or processing time for verification of documents that have metadata.